La psychiatrie devrait être supprimée comme
spécialité
médicale parce que
l'éducation médicale d'école n'est pas
nécessaire ni
même utile pour faire
consultation ou prétendue psychothérapie, parce que
la
perception de
la maladie mentale comme entité biologique est confondue,
parce que psychia-
ont essayé des " traitements " autre que la consultation
ou
la psychothérapie
(principalement drogues et electroshock) blessez plutôt
qu'aidez à peuple,
parce que les médecins nonpsychiatric peuvent mieux
que
psychiatres pour traiter la vraie maladie
de cerveau, et parce que nonpsy-
l'acceptation des médecins chiatric de la psychiatrie en
tant que médical
la spécialité est une réflexion faible sur
la profession
médicale comme a
entier.
Dans les mots de Sigmund Freud en son livre la question
de
Analyse De Configuration: " la première
considération est celle dans le sien médical
instruisez un docteur reçoit une formation qui est plus ou
moins de
opposé de de ce qu'il aurait besoin comme
préparation pour
la psycho-analyse
[ méthode de Freud de psychothérapie ]. Les
névrosés,
en effet, sont
complication peu désirée, un embarras autant
à la
thérapeutique As
à la jurisprudence et au service militaire. Mais
ils existent et sont
un intérêt particulier de médecine.
L'éducation
médicale, cependant,
rien, littéralement rien, vers leur compréhension
et
traitement... Il serait tolérable si éducation
médicale
simplement
n'a pas donné à des médecins n'importe
quelle orientation
dans le domaine du
névroses. Mais il fait plus: il donné leur
un
faux et nuisible
attitude. ... l'instruction analytique inclurait des
branchements de
la connaissance qui sont éloignés de la
médecine et qui le
docteur
non trouvé dans sa pratique: l'histoire de la
civilisation,
mythologie, la psychologie de la religion et la science de
littérature. À moins qu'il soit bon à
la maison
dans ces sujets,
l'analyste peut ne faire rien d'une grande quantité de son
matériel.
Par voie
de la compensation, la grande masse de ce qui est enseigné
dans médical
les écoles est inutile à lui pour ses buts.
Une
connaissance de
anatomie des os tarsal, de la constitution du
hydrates de carbone, du cours des nerfs crâniens, une prise
de tous
cette médecine a mis en évidence sur des causes
excitantes
bacillaires de
la maladie et les moyens de les combattre, sur des
réactions
de sérum et en fonction
néoplasmes - toute cette connaissance, qui est
assurément
de
la valeur la plus élevée en soi, est
néanmoins sans
importance à lui;
elle ne le concerne pas; il ni l'une ni l'autre aides il
directement à
comprenez une névrose et pour la traiter ni il contribue
à
a
affilage de ces capacités intellectuelles sur lesquelles
son
métier
fait les plus grandes demandes... Il est injuste et
inopportun pour essayer
pour contraindre une personne qui veut placer quelqu'un
d'autre libre du
torment d'un phobia ou d'une hantise pour prendre la route de
rond point de
le programme d'études médical. Ni un tel
effort
en aura
succès... " (W.W. Norton & Co, Inc., pp 62, 63, 81,
82).
Dans a
le post-scriptum à ce Dr. Freud de livre a écrit:
il y a
une " certaine heure j'ai analysé
[ psychoanalyzed ] un collègue qui avait
développé a en
particulier
aversion forte pour l'idée de n'importe qui étant
laissé
s'engager dans a
activité médicale qui n'était pas
lui-même un homme
médical. J'étais dans a
position à dire à lui: `We avaient maintenant
fonctionné
pour plus que
trois mois. Quel point dans notre analyse ont à
moi ai eu l'occasion à
servez-vous de ma connaissance médicale? ' Il a
admis que j'avais eu le non
une telle occasion " (pp 92-93). Tandis que Dr.
Freud faisait ces remarques
au sujet de sa propre méthode de psychothérapie,
psycho-analyse, il est dur
pour voir de pourquoi il serait différent pour n'importe
quel autre type
" psychothérapie " ou consultation. En leur livre
concernant la façon faire des emplettes
pour un psychothérapeute, Mandy Aftel, M.A., et groupe de
travail Lakoff, Ph.D.,
faites cette observation: " historiquement, toutes les
formes de `talking '
la psychothérapie sont dérivées de la
psycho-analyse,
comme développé près
Sigmund Freud et ses disciples... Des modèles plus
récents
divergent de
la psycho-analyse à un plus grand ou à peu de
degré, mais
eux tous se reflètent
cette origine. Par conséquent, ils sont tous plus
semblables que différents " (quand
L'entretien n'est pas bon marché, ou comment trouver le
Therapist droit quand vous
Ne savez pas où commencer, Warner Books, 1985, p.
27).
Si
vous pensez l'existence à la
psychiatrie en tant que médical
la spécialité est justifiée par l'existence
des causes
biologiques d'ainsi
appelé maladie mentale ou émotive, vous avez
été
trompés. En 1988 poLe nouveau guide de Harvard de la psychiatrie Seymour S.
Kety, M.D.,
Professeur Emeritus de la neurologie en psychiatrie, et natte
de Steven
thysse, Ph.D., professeur d'associé de Psychobiology, tous
les deux Har-
école médicale de vard, dite " une lecture
impartiale du
récent
la littérature ne fournit pas la clarification
espérée du
les hypothèses de catécholamine, ni contraindre
évidence
émerge pour
d'autres différences biologiques dont peut
caractériser les
cerveaux
patients présentant la maladie mentale " (Harvard Univ.
Appuyez, p. 148).
Ainsi
appelé des " maladies " mentales ou émotives sont
provoquées par malheureux
expérience de la vie - pas biologie. Il n'y a
aucune base biologique pour
le concept de la maladie mentale ou émotive, en
dépit de
spéculatif
théories que vous pouvez entendre. Le cerveau est
un organe du corps, et non
doute il peut avoir une maladie, mais rien que nous pensons
à aujourd'hui As *** TRANSLATION
ENDS HERE ***
mental illness has been traced to a brain disease. There is
no
valid biological test that tests for the presence of any
so-called
mental illness. What we think of today as mental illness
is
psychological, not biological. Much of the treatment that
goes on
in psychiatry today is biological, but other than listening
and
offering advice, modern day psychiatric treatment is as
senseless
as trying to solve a computer software problem by working on
the
hardware. As psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz, M.D., has
said:
Trying to eliminate a so-called mental illness by having a
psy-
chiatrist work on your brain is like trying to eliminate
cigarette
commercials from television by having a TV repairman work on
your
TV set (The Second Sin, Anchor Press, 1973, p. 99).
Since lack of
health is not the cause of the problem, health care is not a
solu-
tion.
There has been increasing recognition of the
uselessness
of psychiatric "therapy" by physicians outside
psychiatry, by young
physicians graduating from medical school, by informed lay
people,
and by psychiatrists themselves. This increasing
recognition is
described by a psychiatrist, Mark S. Gold, M.D., in a book he
pub-
lished in 1986 titled The Good News About Depression.
He says
"Psychiatry is sick and dying," that in 1980 "Less
than half of all
hospital psychiatric positions [could] be filled by graduates
of
U.S. medical schools." He says that in addition to
there being too
few physicians interested in becoming psychiatrists, "the
talent
has sunk to a new low." He calls it "The
wholesale abandonment of
psychiatry". He says recent medical school graduates
"see that
psychiatry is out of sync with the rest of medicine, that it has
no
credibility", and he says they accuse of psychiatry of
being
"unscientific". He says "Psychiatrists have
sunk bottomward on the
earnings totem pole in medicine. They can expect to make
some 30
percent less than the average physician". He says his
medical
school professors thought he was throwing away his career when
he
chose to become a psychiatrist (Bantam Books, pp. 15, 16, 19,
26).
In another book published in 1989, Dr. Gold describes
"how
psychiatry got into the state it is today: in low regard,
ignored
by the best medical talent, often ineffective." He
also calls it
"the sad state in which psychiatry finds itself today"
(The Good
News About Panic, Anxiety, & Phobias, Villard Books, pp.
24 & 48).
In the November/December 1993 Psychology Today magazine,
psychia-
trist M. Scott Peck, M.D., is quoted as saying psychiatry has
experienced "five broad areas of failure" including
"inadequate
research and theory" and "an increasingly poor
reputation" (p. 11).
Similarly, a Wall Street Journal editorial in 1985 says
"psychiatry
remains the most threatened of all present medical
specialties",
citing the fact that "psychiatrists are among the
poorest-paid
American doctors", that "relatively few American
medical-school
graduates are going into psychiatric residencies", and
psychiatry's
"loss of public esteem" (Harry Schwartz, "A
Comeback for
Psychiatrists?", The Wall Street Journal, July 15,
1985, p. 18).
The low esteem of psychiatry in the eyes of physicians
who practice bona-fide health care (that is, physicians in
medical
specialties other than psychiatry) is illustrated in The
Making of
a Psychiatrist, Dr. David Viscott's autobiographical book
published
in 1972 about what it was like to be a psychiatric resident
(i.e.,
a physician in training to become a psychiatrist): "I found
that no
matter how friendly I got with the other residents, they tended
to
look on being a psychiatrist as a little like being a charlatan
or
magician." He quotes a physician doing a surgical
residency saying
"You guys [you psychiatrists] are really a poor excuse for
the
profession. They should take psychiatry out of medical
school and
put it in the department of archeology or anthropology with
the
other witchcraft.' `I feel the same way,' said George Maslow,
the
obstetrical resident..." (pp. 84-87).
It
would be good if the reason for the decline in
psychiatry that Dr. Gold and others describe was increasing
recog-
nition by ever larger numbers of people that the problems
that
bring people to psychiatrists have nothing to do with
biological
health and therefore cannot be helped by biological health care.
But regrettably, belief in biological theories of so-called
mental
illness is as prevalent as ever. Probably, the biggest
reason for
psychiatry's decline is realization by ever increasing numbers
of
people that those who consult mental health professionals
seldom
benefit from doing so.
E.
Fuller Torrey, M.D., a psychiatrist, realized this and
pointed it out in his book The Death of Psychiatry
(Chilton Book
Co., 1974). In that book, Dr. Torrey with unusual clarity
of
perception and expression, as well as courage, pointed out
"why
psychiatry in its present form is destructive and why it must
die."
(This quote comes from the synopsis on the book's dust cover.)
Dr.
Torrey indicates that many psychiatrists have begun to
realize
this, that "Many psychiatrists have had, at least to some
degree,
the unsettling and bewildering feeling that what they have
been
doing has been largely worthless and that the premises on
which
they have based their professional lives were partly
fraudulent"
(p. 199, emphasis added). Presumably, most physicians want
to do
something that is constructive, but psychiatry isn't a field
in
which they can do that, at least, not in their capacity as
physi-
cians - for the same reason TV repairmen who want to improve
the
quality of television programming cannot do so in their capacity
as
TV repairmen. In The Death of Psychiatry, Dr. Torrey
argued that
"The death of psychiatry, then, is not a negative
event" (p. 200),
because the death of psychiatry will bring to an end a
misguided,
stupid, and counterproductive approach to trying to solve
people's
problems. Dr. Torrey argues that psychiatrists have only
two
scientifically legitimate and constructive choices: Either
limit
their practices to diagnosis and treatment of known brain
diseases
(which he says are "no more than 5 percent of the people we
refer
to as mentally `ill'" (p. 176), thereby abandoning the
practice of
psychiatry in favor of bona-fide medical and surgical practice
that
treats real rather than presumed but unproven and probably
nonexistent brain disease - or become what Dr. Torrey calls
"tutors" (what I call counselors) in the art of living,
thereby
abandoning their role as physicians. Of course,
psychiatrists,
being physicians, can also return to real health care practice
by
becoming family physicians or qualifying in other
specialties.
In
an American Health magazine article in 1991 about Dr.
Torrey, he is quoted saying he continues to believe
psychiatry
should be abolished as a medical specialty: "He calls
psychiatrists
witch doctors and Sigmund Freud a fraud. For almost 20
years Dr.
E. (Edwin) Fuller Torrey has also called for the `death' of
psychiatry. ...No wonder Torrey, 53, has been expelled from
the
American Psychiatric Association (APA) and twice removed from
positions funded by the National Institute of Mental Health ...
InThe Death of Psychiatry, Torrey advanced the idea that
most
psychiatric and psychotherapeutic patients don't have medical
prob-
lems. `...most of the people seen by psychotherapists are the
`worried well.' They have interpersonal and intrapersonal
problems
and they need counseling, but that isn't medicine - that's
education. Now, if you give the people with brain diseases
to
neurology and the rest to education, there's really no need
for
psychiatry'" (American Health magazine, October 1991,
p. 26).
The disadvantage to the whole of the medical profession
of recognizing psychiatry as a legitimate medical specialty
occurred to me when I consulted a dermatologist for diagnosis of
a
mole I thought looked suspiciously like a malignant melanoma.
The
dermatologist told me my mole did indeed look suspicious and
should
be removed, and he told me almost no risk was involved.
This
occurred during a time I was doing research on electroshock,
which
I have summarized in a pamphlet titled "Psychiatry's
Electroconvul-
sive Shock Treatment - A Crime Against Humanity". I
found
overwhelming evidence that psychiatry's electric shock
treatment
causes brain damage, memory loss, and diminished intelligence
and
doesn't reduce unhappiness or so-called depression as is claimed.
About the same time I did some reading about psychiatric drugs
that
reinforced my impression that most if not all are ineffective
for
their intended purposes, and I learned many of the most widely
used
psychiatric drugs are neurologically and psychologically
harmful,
causing permanent brain damage if used at supposedly
therapeutic
levels long enough, as they often are not only with the
approval
but the insistence of psychiatrists. I have explained my
reasons
for these conclusions in another pamphlet titled
"Psychiatric Drugs
- Cure or Quackery?" Part of me tended to assume the
dermatologist
was an expert, be trusting, and let him do the minor skin
surgery
right then and there as he suggested. But then, an
imaginary scene
flashed through my mind: A person walks into the office of
another
type of recognized, board-certified medical specialist:
a
psychiatrist. The patient tells the psychiatrist he has
been
feeling depressed. The psychiatrist, who specializes in
giving
outpatient electroshock, responds saying: "No problem.
We can take
care of that. We'll have you out of here within an hour or
so
feeling much better. Just lie down on this electroshock
table
while I use this head strap and some electrode jelly to
attach
these electrodes to your head..." In fact, there is no
reason such
a scene couldn't actually take place in a psychiatrist's
office
today. Some psychiatrists do give electroshock in
their offices on
an outpatient basis. Realizing that physicians in the
other, the
bona-fide, medical and surgical specialties accept biological
psychiatry and all the quackery it represents as legitimate
made
(and makes) me wonder if physicians in the other specialties
are
undeserving of trust also. I left the dermatologist's
office
without having the mole removed, although I returned and had
him
remove it later after I'd gotten opinions from other physicians
and
had done some reading on the subject. Physicians in the
other
specialties accepting biological psychiatry as legitimate
calls
into question the reasonableness and rationality not only of
psychiatrists but of all physicians.
On
November 30, 1990, the Geraldo television talk show
featured a panel of former electroshock victims who told how
they
were harmed by electroshock and by psychiatric drugs.
Also
appearing on the show was psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, Ph.D.,
who
said this: "Now we know that there's no other medical
specialty
which has patients complaining bitterly about the treatment
they're
getting. You don't find diabetic patients on this kind of
show
saying `You're torturing us. You're harming us.
You're hurting
us. Stop it!' And the psychiatrists don't want to
hear that."
Harvard University law professor Alan M. Dershowitz has said
psychiatry "is not a scientific discipline"
("Clash of Testimony in
Hinckley Trial Has Psychiatrists Worried Over Image", The
New York
Times, May 24, 1982, p. 11). Such a supposed health
care specialty
should not be tolerated within the medical profession.
There is no need for a supposed medical specialty such
as
psychiatry. When real brain diseases or other biological
problems
exit, physicians in real health care specialties such as
neurology,
internal medicine, endocrinology, and surgery are best equipped
to
treat them. People who have experience with similar kinds
of
personal problems are best equipped to give counselling about
dealing with those problems.
Despite the assertion by Dr. Torrey that psychiatrists
can choose to practice real health care by limiting themselves
to
the 5% or less of psychiatric patients he says do have real
brain
disease, as even Dr. Torrey himself points out, any time a
physical
cause is found for any condition that was previously thought to
be
psychiatric, the condition is taken away from psychiatry and
treated instead by physicians in one of the real health care
specialties: "In fact, there are many known diseases of the
brain,
with changes in both structure and function. Tumors,
multiple
sclerosis, meningitis, and neurosyphilis are some examples.
But
these diseases are considered to be in the province of
neurology
rather than psychiatry. And the demarcation between the two
is
sharp. ... one of the hallmarks of psychiatry has been
that each
time causes were found for mental `diseases,' the conditions
were
taken away from psychiatry and reassigned to other specialties.
As
the mental `diseases' were show to be true diseases, mongolism
and
phenylketonuria were assigned to pediatrics; epilepsy and
neurosyphilis became the concerns of neurology; and delirium due
to
infectious diseases was handled by internists. ... One is left
with
the impression that psychiatry is the repository for all
suspected
brain `diseases' for which there is no known cause. And
this is
indeed the case. None of the conditions that we now call
mental
`diseases' have any known structural or functional changes in
the
brain which have been verified as causal. ... This is, to say
the
least, a peculiar specialty of medicine" (The Death of
Psychiatry,
p. 38-39). Neurosurgeon Vernon H. Mark, M.D., made a
related
observation in his book Brain Power, published in 1989:
"Around the
turn of the century, two common diseases caused many patients to
be
committed to mental hospitals: pellagra and syphilis of the
brain.
... Now both of these diseases are completely treatable, and
they
are no longer in the province of psychiatry but are included in
the
category of general medicine" (Houghton Mifflin Co., p.
130).
The point is that if psychiatrists want to treat bona-
fide brain disease, they must do so as neurologists,
internists,
endocrinologists, surgeons, or as specialists in one of the
other,
the real, health care specialties - not as psychiatrists.
Treatment
of real brain disease falls within the scope of the other
specialties. Historically, treatment of real brain disease
has not
fallen within the scope of psychiatry. It's time to stop
the
pretense that psychiatry is a type of health care. The
American
Board of Psychiatry and Neurology should be renamed the
American
Board of Neurology, and there should be no more specialty
certifications in psychiatry. Organizations that
formally
represent physicians such as the American Medical Association
and
American Osteopathic Association and similar organizations in
other
countries should cease to recognize psychiatry as a bona-fide
branch of the medical profession.

THE AUTHOR, Lawrence Stevens, is a lawyer whose practice has
included representing psychiatric "patients". His
pamphlets are
not copyrighted. Feel free to make copies.